Improved Successive Cancelation List Decoding for Polar Codes Using Vulnerable Frozen Bits LLRs
Qasim Jan, Zakir Ali, Hafeez Anwar, Shahid Hussain, Zhiwen Pan · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding for polar codes has the ability to achieve Shannon capacity over the binary discrete memoryless channel. However, a large list size is required to achieve the Shannon capacity limit. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel iterative method for the CA-SCL decoder based on frozen bits to improve the error-correction performance of CA-SCL decoding for polar codes with smaller list sizes. The proposed technique determines the vulnerable channel log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for frozen bits that degrade the CA-SCL decoding error correction performance and corrects them for the next CA-SCL decoding attempt. We analyze the behavior of wrongly estimated LLRs of frozen bits during CA-SCL decoding and design an attenuation factor set using a greedy algorithm. The proposed technique employs iterative CA-SCL decoding and revises the wrongly estimated frozen bit LLRs using the attenuation factor set during the decoding process. The simulation results show that the proposed technique achieves a block error rate (BLER) performance gain of up to 0.25 compared with the CA-SCL decoder, with a minor increase in computational complexity. Moreover, the attenuation factor set can be adjusted arbitrarily to balance performance and complexity.